The brief

Prepare your materials and working surfaces to develop images based on your route.  This time, you’ll be working from home or your studio.  Start by choosing one of the landmarks from your route, using your photos and sketchbook drawings for reference.

Reflect on what your drawings of the landmarks convey.  If you don’t have notes in your sketchbook, write down some descriptive words.  These could be simple adjectives like “busy,” “grand,” “secluded,” or even notes on the weather conditions.

You may have an idea about the place that is far from the truth, or ironic, such as choosing the word elegant for a dilapidated building.  The description may be about a real or imagined connection between sketches from different stages of your route.  This could be the big scale of buildings from one page and the relative littleness of commuters from another – the adjective may be ant-like.

Use your drawings and photos as references to create new visual “snapshots.”  Sketch, refine, and edit various scenes to combine information from both visual sources. 

As you do this be conscious of one of your chosen words and think about how to communicate it through your choice of composition, colour, marks, materials and textures.  This might mean exaggerating certain qualities in the drawing, or changing elements of the drawing altogether, as well as combining elements from different sketches.

Using any photos in support of this process may help you to see the scene in new ways.  It’s important, though, that you see them only as a form of visual reference and don’t get distracted by adding details if this isn’t relevant to what you are trying to communicate.  Remember that you’re not copying the photos.  It might help to put them on a wall further away, drawing from them as though they are a scene.

These drawings don’t have to be finished.  Your aim is to be more interpretive in your approach, to explore how the sense of place can be heightened or distorted by the way that you treat the drawing away from location itself, in a studio setting.  The various choices you make in terms of composition, colour and mark-making will contribute to this process of description.  You will be exploring how to make an image based on description that is increasingly interpretative.

Spider diagram

To better understand the brief and explore the keywords from my sketches and photos, I created a spider diagram.  Here are the landmarks I chose from my route:

• Open Door
• Pavement
• Tree
• Park
• Nature vs. Man-made
• Plants
• Land and Water
• Zoomed-in flowerbeds

Open door

Stepping from my man-made house into a mix of nature and human-made elements highlighted the tension between the two.  We seek nature to escape our busy lives, yet pure natural spaces are rare, often intermixed with human-made structures.

Pavement

It seems like the man-made is trying to “break into” nature, but looking at the pavement, you can see nature “breaking into” the man-made, with the grass trying to break through the small cracks in the pavement.

Tree

Even the tree adapts as it grows around man-made elements and towards the light.

Park

In the park, you see organic shapes of nature, which contrast with the stark rectangular or angular shapes of the man-made.

Plants and zoomed-in flower beds

Once you zoom in, it seems like the plants are re-gaining their pure natural space and original character in their own world.  The structure of flower beds and flowers planted in a structured pattern is not really visible when zoomed in.

Land and water

The details and textures of the grass, trees and plants contrast with the smooth, mirror surface of the water.

I can now say I have established my key phrase for this project: Man-made vs Nature.

Man-made vs. Nature

As part of my route, I walked through an Educational Garden.  The garden is beautifully maintained, and each plant has its Latin name engraved on a stone. 

I am going to use this garden as an example of the man-made element combined with nature.  I have used my photo and sketch of this educational garden to create a new illustration depicting “Man-made vs. nature”.

The sketch on the far left (Figure 3) exaggerates the man-made elements as well as the natural elements. The pavement seems to go on forever, and plants are trying to grow from the little gaps between the pavement stones. The fluorescent light seems out of place in what is supposed to be nature. The large plant is potted, which is not a plant’s natural state.  By exaggerating both the man-made and natural elements, the tension between the two becomes more visible to the viewer.

In sketches 2, 3, and 4, I use digital collage by “cutting up” my sketchbook, to exaggerate the nature aspect of the start of my walk as I open the door. I also used different photos of doors to try ideas for composition and various perspectives.

It can be said that plants interact with humans the same way humans interact with them.I can further build on this idea, which originated initially in my sketchbook, by observing elements on my walk.

The illustration animation in Figure 5 sparked another idea that led to the outcome of Figure 6.  I asked myself, “How else can there be an interaction between a plant and a human being?”  This time, I decided to make the plant so big that the human being could sit in the flower, almost like in the story of Thumbelina.

I experimented with different rendering techniques by scanning my pencil drawing into Photoshop and then using different blending modes to create a digital drawing and bringing in subtle colours. (Figure 6)

The digital rendering removes some of the drawing’s tactile qualities, but it adds a more refined and delicate feel, which I think is appropriate to the subject matter.

I really liked the idea of opening a door and walking from the man-made into nature, so I tried the concept in a different digital rendering by using the lasso tool and cutting out the shapes out of watercolour brush strokes. (Figure 7, left)

I then used my eraser tool to draw the detail on the jersey, hand and door detail.  The lasso tool is not a perfectly precise tool and gives the shapes an organic natural feel with hand-drawn edges, which I like.  I especially like the shapes I could achieve with the tree branches.

On the right of Figure 7, I went back to the Drawing with Teabags project to use my beetroot sketchbook pages as a background.  I then used cut-outs from my sketchbook going back to my original route to create a new illustration.  It is all about the pull and push between nature and man-made again.  The plants find a way to seek out light and grow through the pavement (pushing against the human-made).   I included the seagull because that same push and pull can be found when looking at birds.  Somehow, they find a way to survive, despite co-existing with human elements.  They build a nest and keep on existing, which is part of nature. Comparing each of these illustrations with each other, I would say I discovered the most ideas by making a spider diagram and looking for keywords, adjectives, and landmarks. Once I started working on the new ideas that sprouted out of my sketches of my original route, more ideas for rendering developed.

The composition and interpretation that conveys the adjective the best, which has mostly to do with the key phrase, man-made vs. nature, is Figure 8, Pavement and Nature.  The image is simple with a clear message.  Where is the seagull going to land? On the pavement?  The plant has found a way to grow through the pavement and seems to be happy in its environment because it is producing flowers. The colours and hierarchy are working well.  The important elements are clear and vibrantly visible (hierarchy), and there is harmony in colours.  The green-blue of the plant and the lines of the pavement draw the eye in, guiding it to the horizon and to exit through the seagull.  By creating enough white space I can feel the tension between the man-made and nature.  The materials I used are beetroot (nature), charcoal nature) and watercolour.  These are mixed with digital elements and put together by means of digital collage (which is human-made).

Building upon sketchbook work is a vital tool for generating ideas and exploring subjects in depth.  This exercise highlights the importance of keeping a sketchbook.  By maintaining a lively sketchbook process, illustrators and designers can continuously generate fresh ideas and avoid creative blocks.